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I keep having to say this: If they would show some balance in their commentary, I would be more willing to listen. However, the continual Trump bashing just wears me out. It isn’t that I like him, I don’t, but as much as I dislike Trump on a personal level, it doesn’t come close to my distain for the various Democrats who would like to take his seat from him. Mona and Jay seem far less willing to attack those people, for all of their foibles than they do Trump, and that is tiresome. Their sympathy, scant though it was, for Cohen was far greater than any they have ever extended to Trump. Cohen is slime ball, a parasite who clung to Trump for years, taking all he could get. That anyone could possibly believe, as Jay and Mona seemed to imply, that he had somehow seen the light isn’t naive, it is plain stupid. I have always liked Jay and Mona, but I am finding it harder and harder to tolerate this behavior. Where, exactly, do they think the country, the economy, the Supreme Court, and unemployment would be right now if Hillary had won the election?

I didn’t mind this one. Cohen is indeed a slimeball but Trump hired him. And Trump and Korea is truly awful. Yes things would be worse if Hillary had won but they may be even worse on the rebound from Trump.

Mona and Jay are pretty much conventional Republicans, the kind that Democrats like to run against. They are people of high moral character who detest dirty tricks and believe in fairness and integrity. The Democrats are unhampered by any of those values. At an earlier time it is possible that one could get elected as a Republican and maintain the level of integrity that Mona and Jay love and exemplify. However, I contend that in 2016 election it wasn’t possible to do that. Hillary with the help of a goodly number of government employees and a host of tricksters set out to insure her election. This was Democrat dirty trick taken several notches higher than usual. What was needed was someone not averse to getting his hands dirty. In retrospect, I think of the candidates that stood on the stage with Donald Trump and realize that only he could have fit the bill. He proved that by eliminating everyone of them out of hand. If they couldn’t face down Trump, how did they ever expect to face down Hillary and the united leftist media. It was an impossibility.

This really was the Flight 93 election. We are seeing that everyday as the left unfolds its real agenda, unrestricted abortions and infanticide, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, total ban of civilian held firearms, and unrestricted immigration just for a start. If you believe, as Mona and Jay seem to think, that this is just the radical wing of the Democrat party, you are deluding yourself. This is their agenda, and it will only get worse. The nice, rational cocktail parties where everyone met and chatted are over. The left was jarred by Trump’s victory, and they dropped all pretense of civility. The mask is off, and as ugly as Trump may seem, he is nothing compared to an entire party of rabid Progressives who thought that Obama’s election heralded the begining of a new age in which they would hold power eternally. As I stated elsewhere, you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Trump is our Desert Eagle in .50 Caliber. I would, like Mona and Jay, prefer a quiet sitdown and rational discussion, but the Democrats won’t have it. They want unconditional surrender. That isn’t going to happen with Donald Trump, though it might well have had any of his Republican opponents won the nomination. It certainly would have if Bill Kristol was incharge.

Mona and Jay would rather lose an election than lose their souls. And I agree with them.

Truthfully, think that is a bit dramatic. Working to preserve our country, our freedoms, and our rights is what winning elections is about now. It isn’t like in the old days when there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the parties. The modern Democrats aren’t like Harry Truman or John Kennedy, real patriots who loved their country. This new breed is interested in increasing their power and control way beyond boundaries any earlier version of Democrat would have dreamed of. I hate to keep harping on this issue, but at what point in the history of the Democrat party would they ever have voted against a measure that insured the life of a baby who survived an attempted abortion. What other generation of Democrats believed that a baby wasn’t a baby until it left the hospital and was taken home. When could someone even say that without being completely ostrocized. When did it become fashionable for mainsttream Democrats to support socialism and not see it as a dirty word. These are a different species of politician. They want to fundamentally change the greatest country that has ever existed in the history of mankind. It isn’t a matter of just winning elections, we are fighting for the preservation of our nation, our heritage, our laws, and our freedom to be individuals. You see Venezuela, they voted in Chavez freely. Now look at them. You think that can’t happen here? Guess again. The other side doesn’t believe you have a soul to lose.

@eugenekriegsmann I just can’t buy the premise that it had to be Trump. That is buying what Trump is selling. No thanks. It isn’t the Democrats and it isn’t Trump. There has to be something better. I get voting for Trump when it is a choice between Trump and the Democrats but it shouldn’t have been that choice. Sadly it will be that choice again. There are others that can beat the Democrats. There were others that could beat Hillary.

@juliablaschke I agree that he is a bad choice, but, think about it. No one on that stage came close to him but my personal favorite, Ted Cruz, and even he fell in defeat against Trump’s onslaught. Hillary would have crushed him in the general election. If you couldn’t beat Trump in the primary, you wouldn’t beat Hillary in the general. The Republican voters chose Trump, not Cruz. Cruz is brilliant, but he doesn’t appeal the masses. Trump did, and when it came down to it, he was a much better choice than Hillary. Hillary should have been Democrat’s choice either. But in the end that is the way the chips fell, and the choice was binary and it was an ugly dose of reality.

@eugenekriegsmann Nah. It would have been very different if Jeb hadn’t wasted time and money going after Rubio. Then the anti Trump vote was too divided. It was a mess. But any of them could have beaten Hillary. Even Trump. Such a lost opportunity. The primary system seems rigged to give us the worst possible choices in the general. Now we will have an awful choice again.

Mona and Jay would rather lose an election than lose their souls. And I agree with them.

Every NEED TO KNOW thread now seems to devolve into this sort of false binary: To Trump or not to Trump.

People seem to forget that there is a third option, which is to A) condemn Trump and the more rabid members of his base and categorically refuse to vote for him, while at the same time B) castigating the Left for its toxicity and increased radicalization.

Mona and Jay are perfectly willing to do “A” but, in the last 12 months or so, seem far less willing to do “B.”

You called 2016 the Flight 93 election, and you say I’m a bit dramatic? :)

It’s so obviously untrue. The country survived eight years of Obama, eight years of Bill Clinton, four years of Jimmy Carter. We would have survived Hillary; God knows her foreign policy would’ve been far better than Obama’s.

Flight-93-ifying things is always an overreaction. The American people punish parties who go rogue. When Democrats overreached with Obamacare, we had four straight elections in which they were decimated in federal, state, and local elections. We didn’t need Trump for that.

More importantly, Republicans didn’t pick Trump “to stop Hillary”. They picked Trump because they went insane, and they did so long before the Democrats turned socialist and infanticidal. Any other candidate would have won in a landslide; Trump was the only one who started off losing. Choosing him was madness. We could have had Jeb, or Rubio, or Graham as president. And with them in office we would have won the 2018 elections as well.

Finally, I noticed something in your description of the Democratic party: that want to fundamentally change the country, they’re only interested in power and control without boundaries, 15-20 years ago they would have been ostracized, they don’t want rational discussion, etc.

Those are the exact same things Democrats are saying about Republicans.

filmklassik (View Comment):
Mona and Jay are perfectly willing to do “A” but, in the last 12 months or so, seem far less willing to do “B.”

Maybe they less frequently discuss Democrats, because they’re more focused on – more worried about – the battle for the soul of the Republican Party right now. But their political positions on socialism and abortion and taxes haven’t changed.

I mean, look at the last few episodes of Jay’s Q&A podcast. Venezuela, the Iran deal, Venezuela, transgender lunacy, Venezuela… How can you say that he’s unwilling to criticize the left?

So in this particular podcast, they’re more focused on A than B. That’s fine. People should discuss what they feel most strongly about. I can well understand the impetus that says, “Forget attacking the Left right now, if I don’t do something about what’s happened to the Right I won’t have a political home anymore, and that’s much more pressing”.

Those are the exact same things Democrats are saying about Republicans.

The worst part is, they’re both right.

If that is, in fact true, then I want to be sure that our side wins. Late term abortions and infanticide, antisemitism (which the acts of the Democrats in the House are attempting to water down), the moves to socialism by all of the major Democrat candidates for president are pushing, open borders, single payer healthcare, and on and on, are all on their agenda, and that isn’t just drama and rhetoric. If they win we lose, and what we lose is far too valuable to give up without a fight, and in fight all of us need to stick together. We can work out our differences after we win.

filmklassik (View Comment):
Mona and Jay are perfectly willing to do “A” but, in the last 12 months or so, seem far less willing to do “B.”

I can well understand the impetus that says, “Forget attacking the Left right now, if I don’t do something about what’s happened to the Right I won’t have a political home anymore, and that’s much more pressing”.

I can’t. And neither can Jonah Goldberg (no Trumper he) who in a recent podcast explained perfectly why it is imperative that we must — if we hope to win the hearts and minds of those who are still persuadable — go on criticizing the Right, naturally, while also condemning at least as often that which is destructive about the Left.

Thus the phrase “Forget attacking the left right now” packs a lot of toxicity into just six simple words.

This quote from Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt this AM seems to me a perfect distillation:

“If the mainstream media could offer some belated acknowledgement that the 2016 campaign was between two dishonest, egomaniacal narcissists prone to rewriting history to please their egos, it would be appreciated.”

In reference to what Jonah said, I am in complete agreement with him on almost every issue. I just don’t believe that even though the vast majority of Republicans support Trump that they actually like him or feel that his lying, egocentric behaviors are in any way palatable. I suspect that the majority are like me, they dislike him, wish another Republican had been elected, but at the same time understand the state of politics in the current environment and know that as bad as he is, the alternative would be far worse. When you are faced with two choices of an awful nature, you don’t your soul because you choose the less repugnant of the two.

I just don’t believe that even though the vast majority of Republicans support Trump that they actually like him or feel that his lying, egocentric behaviors are in any way palatable. I suspect that the majority are like me, they dislike him, wish another Republican had been elected, but at the same time understand the state of politics in the current environment and know that as bad as he is, the alternative would be far worse. When you are faced with two choices of an awful nature, you don’t your soul because you choose the less repugnant of the two.

This doesn’t explain their behavior towards e.g. Roy Moore. They don’t “wish another Republican had been elected” – they’ve made their peace with the new reality and are marching lockstep with it into moral oblivion.

What two choices of an awful nature? We could easily impeach Trump for gross dereliction of duty and install Mike Pence instead. There is nothing awful about him. Why do congressional Republicans so eagerly defend Trump when it would be so easy to instead have a non-dishonest, non-egomaniacal, non-narcissistic president who is an actual conservative?

Huh! You need to define dereliction of duty, and prove your point. Granted impeachment is a political trial, so it is not a legal matter, but your point is, frankly absurd. I don’t like the man, but he’s doing his job, and, so far, the way the country is running is a lot better than the eight years that preceded his term.

As to Roy Moore, I don’t know too many people who defended him. I am sure there were some, but the numbers had to be minuscule.